Royce Zia: Modeling Protein Synthesis by Totally Asymmetric Simple Exclusion Processes (TASEP)
Abstract:
About 40 years ago, a mathematician and a chemist were motivated by very different problems to study models with "particles" hopping along a one dimensional lattice. The simplest of these (TASEP: totally asymmetric simple exclusion process) enjoyed considerable attention and much of its properties are known rigorously and can be computed exactly. After a short overview of TASEP, generalizations which are more appropriate for modeling the translation process in protein synthesis will be introduced. Recent findings, especially on the effects of inhomogeneous hopping rates, will be reported.